1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for supporting system development, and more specifically, to an apparatus for supporting development of information processing systems, applicable to integration of distributed computing environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
With advancement of information technologies and expanding use of computers, many companies have introduced information processing systems into their business operations. As the scale of their business grows, a wider variety of computer programs, or applications, will be required to process a diverse range of business data. Further, the applications and data to be processed thereby must dynamically change according to entry into a new market and re-engineering of business practices. As the applications and data change, the business computer systems are naturally required to be reconfigured to stay competitive.
System development tools are provided to meet the above-described needs, which propose optimum configurations of computer systems to suit actual business activities in each enterprise. Not only satisfying the current needs, the tools will also provide a good estimate for a system reconfiguration to be needed in future.
Meanwhile, strong demands for client/server systems have emerged in recent years by greatly improved cost/performance ratios in open system environments, including personal computers and UNIX-based workstations. In fact, development of client/server systems requires precise analysis and study on how to assign the necessary applications and data resources to mixed computer platforms and databases.
However, it is very difficult for the conventional system development tools to support such analysis and study. Historically, traditional computer systems used in most companies were configured as centralized computing environments where a plurality of remote terminals were connected to a single central host computer providing the terminals with various data processing services. The conventional system development tools, therefore, are not ready for heterogeneous environments consisting of a plurality of computer platforms each having different performance. This is why the conventional tools are unable to adapt to client/server systems development which includes complicated total requirements analysis and optimization of application allocation.